We Are Getting the Future of Work All Wrong
You can’t open LinkedIn or browse the Harvard Business Review without seeing the epic battle between advocates of remote work and devotees of in-person work. Mark Zuckerberg openly affirms how remote work has made him happier and more productive—benefits he hopes to share with at least 50% of Meta’s workforce, while Citigroup CEO Jamie Dimon insists that Citi employees get themselves back into the office—or else. The lines in the sand couldn’t be more clearly drawn.
But in our rush to settle once and for all where employees should work, we have missed the point entirely. To establish where employees are most productive, we need to ask ourselves what kind of work they will be doing. It is impossible to have a meaningful conversation about hybrid work until we have answered the more difficult question: What is work and how does it add value to organizations?
I am a consultant, and when companies reach out to me with a problem, I write a proposal for how I can help. Imagine if, before I ever addressed what I would be doing, I prefaced the conversation by stating, “I plan to be remote 90% of the time and in-person 10% of the time.” Most clients would respond that the appropriate balance depends on the nature of the work itself, and they would be right. It makes no sense to set the parameters of where work will occur before identifying what the work is, yet that is exactly what we are doing now.
Our modern work patterns are based on a factory model of production, which continues to influence our underlying assumptions about productivity and value, even though the nature of work has shifted profoundly just in the past 10 years, much less the last 90! In a factory setting, output increases with time on the job, though at a decreasing rate. Common sense dictates that there is a natural limit to the amount of physical labor that an individual worker can perform in the course of a 24-hour day, but early factory owners did their best to push that limit, often subjecting workers to grueling 14-16 hour shifts.
The idea that activity equals productivity continues to shape the way that we think and talk about work, even though very few of us work in factory settings. A recent New York Times article reported that a growing number of employers are using software to monitor their employees’ activities, a practice that rewards activity over productivity. Working mothers, though they are revered culturally as powerhouses of productivity, are among the lowest paid, largely because of the perception that they put in fewer hours (regardless of their overall impact).
If someone were using productivity tracking software on me, I’d look like a pretty terrible employee. I bounce between so many different tasks during the day that it is hard for me to always point to what I accomplished. I might spend 45 minutes doing background reading for a client call, get on a 45-minute call, and then jump on the keyboard and to bang out a client proposal. If I lose my train of thought or get stuck, I’ll get up and move around a bit, which usually helps me focus my thinking and get back on track. My keyboard might sit idle for 5-10 minutes at a time, but I can assure you that I am engaged in productive work.
The problem is that very few organizations are having the conversation about what work is and how employees add value. Chances are employees deliver value in radically different ways, depending on their role, their skills, and a host of other considerations. When most employees were performing the same physical or mental task, in either a factory or an office setting, it was easy to define the nature and value of their work: it was measured by their output.
There are many jobs, however, in which that output is increasingly difficult to measure, though that doesn’t seem to deter us from devising productivity metrics to do so. What is the value of a brainstorming session that inspired cross-functional collaboration and might have been the seed of a new idea for the company? How do you quantify two hours of uninterrupted, heads-down time that enabled an employee to draft a white paper?
Writing, reading, analyzing, experimenting—these are tasks that don’t follow the easy logic of productivity, and while they are increasingly common in the American labor force, we have completely ignored how the evolving character of work affects how employees should work. I can guarantee that gluing employees to chairs in the office for 12 hours a day, especially if they are engaged in thought work, will not generate the increases in productivity many employers are hoping for.
As frustrating as it may be from a human resources perspective, human beings are not machines and their productivity is not linear. This is even more true in those fields of the economy that require innovation, creative thinking, and all that other great stuff we celebrate as the cornerstone of American economic preeminence.
The answer to the question, what is work, will vary widely across organizations and even across employees within those organizations. Clerical tasks are highly amenable to remote work; surgery, not so much. Does this mean that all clerical staff should be remote and surgeons spend every day in office? Of course not. As our economy becomes increasingly complex, our vision of productivity must become more nuanced, and we need to have the more difficult and at times tedious discussions about the specific ways that employees add value.
The cookie-cutter approach to productivity, based on the outdated factory model, will not get us to where we want to be. The strategic opportunity of the COVID-19 pandemic was not to discover that remote work can be productive (neuroscientists and workplace specialists have been saying this for decades), but to start a new conversation about work.
